


The kids are all right

by keeptheearthbelow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 06:20:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5118407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keeptheearthbelow/pseuds/keeptheearthbelow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A slice of life and insight as the people of District Twelve work to rebuild the bakery. An alternate-POV from my old story <em>Regrowth</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The kids are all right

**Author's Note:**

> This is written in kind of an experimental style, first-person plural, where it’s the collective group narrating. I thought I’d try it after reading _Then We Came to the End_ by Joshua Ferris, because it really seems to work for a story that would get recounted by a group of rambling people with various viewpoints.

There comes to be a little regular group of us who work on the bakery construction. It isn’t that we’re trying to get in good with a victor, though that’s what some people around the district think. Peeta Mellark is a nice boy – young man – but he can be hard to carry on a conversation with, what with the dropping off mid-sentence from time to time. We have a little go-round about whether he was always that way and we didn’t know it, seeing as most of us are Seam and never talked to him much if at all before the war, or if something happened to him. The latter seems more likely, since he used to have that golden way with words and all, and we can’t quite picture him making some of those speeches anymore, at least not straight to finish without stopping. Perhaps he’s gone a bit mad, they say victors do, and a couple of folks in the district were there for something that happened in the dining hall once that made them think he’s gone mad, but a couple other folks say it was just a big argument among all the young people. Anyway, it’s hard to see why you’d want to get in good with a victor, since so many of them have supposedly turned drunk or mean or crazy. For the money? Ours are giving most of their money away already, now that they’re allowed to. So the main things that working on the bakery gets us are work a little more varied than the factory construction, and extra bread every day.

The boy doesn’t have any particular knowledge about building and he knows it, so he doesn’t pretend he’s in charge. He helped with building the new houses here, but some of us used to build support structures in the mines and also had to work harder at keeping our old houses upright. We work from his careful drawings in a schoolboy’s notebook and tell him where adjustments will be needed and he goes along, grateful for the help. We like it when people drop by to join in for an hour or a day, struck by ideas of what all could be built along this street, of what Twelve could be.

The roof is the first and only thing the boy refuses to work on, and for a second it’s surprising, and then Vetch mutters aside, “Bad leg,” and we all remember and nod and that’s all right. He needs a cane to walk through town but sometimes you forget, or it just fades into the background. He’s not the only young person around here who can’t walk without support. But then Donal gets it into his head that the roof work is extra dangerous and so he won’t let his kids climb up there either. Seff and Josy protest, and before long Donal will have to give up on this paranoia, but you can’t blame him for avoiding any risk that those two could follow the other four and their mother into an early grave. So now our work site has the oddity of the three youngest being the only ones who are never up on the roof.

Turns out, though, it isn’t really about the bad leg (or is it both legs? we go around about this too and watch him out of the corners of our eyes and disagree), and it isn’t a fear of heights, which was the other theory. We don’t know what exactly sets it off. Arn was talking to him right beforehand and blamed it on Trish and Hewey swinging a steel beam around into place, sending a reflected flash of sunlight across Peeta’s face, but why that should have done it, none of us knows, and so we tell Trish and Hewey not to feel bad. Peeta, in the middle of a word, flinches and Arn swears later he saw something weird happen to his eyes, the pupils not reacting as they should to the sudden brightness, and then he flings his arms over his head and staggers.

Arn says, “Son?” and we all turn to look if we weren’t already. The hammers come to a halt. Arn and Lindy reach for him and Peeta chokes, “Don’t-touch-me,” like it’s all one word. (“What did he say?” Fran says from up on the roof.) He’s trying to back away and reaches with one hand like he might find something to lean on or grasp, but there’s nothing there, and so Rodja and Lindy take his arms and sit him on a log that’s right there at the edge of the construction site, and it’s good they don’t have to take him far because this panicky noise comes out of him and his hands try to ward them off. They let go of his elbows fast and he tucks his arms in and curls over his knees. His breath sounds strained and his fingers grip into his hair. With that light hair you can see that his whole scalp is flushed.

We all just stand around or peer over the edge of the roof. Hewey is the first to shrug and go back to his roof joint. We mill about and have water breaks and watch our baker/tribute/victor/resident potential madman. Some of us used to wonder if he’d want to be our district delegate whenever we get around to having elections, with the nice way he talks and all he’s seen of the world, but most of us have decided he’s not well suited to that anymore, poor kid, and this’ll convince the rest.

Fran sits down next to him and tries to pat him soothingly or something, but he reacts like she’s touched him with a hot poker. We all look around at each other. Possibly this is beyond our ken.

“Best not touch him, it seems,” Rodja points out unhelpfully.

“Well how can you just stand there and look at him?” Fran demands, hurt. But we continue staring anyway, and Peeta doesn’t indicate an opinion, just rocks a bit over his knees.

“This roof isn’t going to finish itself, you lot,” Hewey says from up there.

“Let him be for a minute, maybe?” Vetch says, and we all get back to work, except for Lindy and Arn, who have a seat on the log on either side of Peeta.

The minutes tick by, and the sun is lowering so we all put in the work needed to wrap up tasks for the day. Those of us who pass within hearing distance of Peeta can hear his uneven breath and see his white knuckles. Lindy and Arn trade out with Fran and Ronell to sit with him. Josy and Seff plop down nearby, half fascinated, half bored, and Donal looks like he’s at war with himself over whether to order them to move away. Em won’t go near him and we all know that she lives next door to him so we wonder what she knows that we don’t, but it seems rude to ask. Those of us on the roof have a little discussion about whether to go see if Katniss is around, then conclude that she almost certainly isn’t, then wonder if it’d be worth it to find Haymitch instead. The man admittedly has done some good things and is really important to our pair of victor kids here, but listen, we don’t just forgive and forget the years before that, meaning the kids before that, and anyway he’s an asshole and a drunk and nobody wants to go find him. After the work stops we just call it a day and have a seat on the crates and such, as though we’re having a very serious picnic. Annaree and Jake, who put in work at the train station, pass by and look at us curiously and join us. We explain in murmurs. They agree with us that Katniss will probably come through at some point and we can ask her for suggestions if he isn’t better by then. We could all walk him home, if he gets better and she isn’t back. We’re not going to all go home and leave only Em to walk back up to the village with him.

We notice by degrees that his breathing sounds less like he’s drowning, then we look over and his hands are on his face instead of pulling his hair, and then he’s just sitting there looking down at the ground, with no expression anybody can tell from that angle. Ronell puts a water bottle within his field of view and he jumps a mile. Ronell startles too. Peeta covers his face again and shakes his head, then reaches for the bottle and fumbles the cap off.

“Son?” Arn tries again. Peeta doesn’t reply, just scoots forward off the log so he can lean back on it while sitting on the ground. “Son, are you gonna be okay there?” He gets a shrug for an answer.

Em speaks up, still looking skittish. “Do you want us to go find Katniss?”

Peeta’s eyes track to her. “Why?”

Nobody can think of an answer. We may as well have asked if we should go find Greasy Sae.

Peeta eventually says in a quiet hoarse voice, “If that happens again, everybody do a favor and don’t touch me. But I’m usually better at catching it,” and he sounds apologetic.

“Don’t touch you? But honey, why, what would happen?” Fran says.

He shrugs. “Possibly nothing.”

If he’s waiting for us to catch on to something, he’ll have a long wait.

Rodja says, “So this isn’t the first time of this, then?” Peeta shakes his head. “Anything you want us to know, then, seeing as we all spend our days with you?”

The boy looks up properly then and stares at him as though he isn’t entirely sure what Rodja is talking about. His eyes flick around and land back on Rodja and he says, blankly, “What _don’t_ you know about me?”

Suddenty it’s hard to quite look him in the eye. At least he doesn’t seem to notice how much we all gossip and speculate.

Trish says, “What just happened?”

He doesn’t seem to know how to answer. He stares around for a minute, maybe wondering if we do know and this is some kind of trick. He looks at the ground and seems to be trying to find words. “Say my arm was screwed up,” he begins, nonsensically. He doesn’t glance up to see everyone look annoyed and confused, but he must know we do, because he adds, “Just pretend for a minute. That my arm was screwed up, like the nerves, maybe, and sometimes it would just flail around and I had to hold on for a minute, because it acted like it was attached to some other person leading some other life and I had to hold on to keep it from doing something dangerous.” He’s miming this, clamping one arm against him with the other.

Okay, we all nod.

“Now say it isn’t my arm, but my brain.”

That’s a little different. Oh. That’s a little worse. We shift around uneasily. Donal looks like he might haul his kids away.

Peeta says, as sincerely as we’ve ever heard anybody say anything, “I’m sorry. Usually it isn’t a big deal.”

Lindy mumbles, “But honey, I thought you just had … memories. Like the rest of us.” It isn’t exactly all the rest of us – some of us have nightmares, and some of us can hardly remember any of it, and some of us are just tough cusses who roll along untouched – but most of us, when we closed our eyes in Thirteen, and when we came back here and began to bury the bodies, sometimes we just had to stop in our tracks and let the memories take over for a minute, because they were going to whether we let them or not.

Peeta says, “Sometimes. Sometimes not.”

Josy’s eyes have been huge since he mimed a claw-fingered hand. “How’d you get that way?”

He looks at the little girl cautiously. We shouldn’t think of her as a little girl, it’s just that there’s hardly any kids. She’s only slightly younger than the boy she’s just asked this very rude question of. We all want to know, of course. Except the way he’s considering his answer, maybe we don’t.

“Do you know what tracker jackers are?” he asks, and all of us recoil instinctively.

“Yes. They make you afraid, make you see things. Katniss dropped a nest of tracker jackers,” she says promptly.

He closes his eyes and freezes for a minute. Nobody knows what’s going on.

“Stop talking,” Seff hisses at her.

She hisses back, “He asked what we wanted to know.” If we’ve got nothing else in this moment, it’s nice to see those two acting halfway normal, because it isn’t their fault that they were the middle siblings. The older two carried the little two and got slowed down and never made it to the safety of the forest.

Peeta rubs his eyes and says, “How old are you guys?”

Thirteen and fourteen are their answers. We calculate to ourselves, automatically. Josy has never had her name in a reaping bowl. Seff’s name was only ever in the one when Peeta’s name was drawn.

Their ages must help him decide how to answer, because he pushes up his sleeves and holds his arms palm-up toward them and says, “This isn’t from the arena. It was tracker jacker venom, but it was done to me on purpose.”

We’ve seen the little needle-point scars and marks on the insides of his elbows all summer. We’ve had lots of ideas about what they were.

“I sort of assumed everybody knew,” he adds.

We didn’t. Or at least we think we didn’t, or maybe we didn’t want to. But now we let a few stupid questions breathe out of our mouths. And, incredibly, he answers. It was in the Capitol. They did a lot of things. They thought he had information about the rebellion. Then it was to make him go along with things. Then it was to make him hate Katniss. In fact, to make him kill Katniss. Yes, she knows. Because he tried. Yes. Twice. No, he will never be completely okay, because at this point it isn’t poison, it’s brain damage.

He looks rapidly more exhausted and we all just stop and stare at each other for a moment. “You’re only eighteen,” Jake says, like he can’t believe it, like it’s the saddest fact of all.

“I was seventeen,” Peeta points out. Then looks startled, then, bizarrely, happy. “That was a whole year ago.”

We cringe. Because he is so young that a year is a long time.

“You didn’t have to tell us all this,” Em whispers. Em, of all people, who doesn’t exactly look less terrified, but she has stayed here this whole time.

Peeta shrugs, tired. “I could hardly say I walked into a door just now, could I? Better to be honest about it. For everybody.”

Is he talking about what we think he’s talking about? Does he have any idea what he just did? Was that sucker punch a payback for us asking these questions?

He looks around at our faces, aghast or averted, and says, “You guys. It happened, it’s over, I thought you all already knew. Thank you for working on the bakery. I’ll come back tomorrow, but if you think on it and decide you don’t want to come back, that’s okay.”

Most of us, later, can hardly admit that we were tempted. It’s hard to stick by folks. It’s hard not to turn your head away from things you wish had never happened. It might be worse with somebody like him, because most of the time with him, you can forget.

Seff glances back and forth between his father and Peeta and says, “But Mr. Mellark, you’re not actually crazy, right?”

Peeta is looking at him like he has spoken some made-up language. “What?”

Seff looks despairing. We all know he and his sister both like being at the bakery, finally having something their father will let them do every day. It’s hard, this new world, because you used to try not to love your kids too much, in case they were taken to die, and now you have to figure out whether it’s possible to love them too much. The new world came too late for most of us, though, because so many people were in the square when the bombs fell. So very many of the kids were there, to watch the showdown as it unfolded, to witness whether Katniss and Peeta would live. Nobody was ready for what we’d lose or what we’d gain.

Peeta, here, is looking like he’s slowly getting the punch line of a joke. He chortles into his hands for a minute, which does nothing for anybody’s idea of his sanity, and then says to Seff, “Who are you calling Mr. Mellark? That was my _dad_! I’m barely older than you!”

Seff says, offended, “We’re supposed to be respectful.” Josy is nodding, backing him up.

Peeta is convulsed with laughter. “But it’s hilarious!”

Okay, okay, some of us are also laughing now. Donal is looking awkward.

Seff says tentatively, “Sorry?”

Peeta wipes his eyes. “That’s the best thing that’s happened all day.”

So the mood is sort of broken anyway when Vetch looks across the circle of us and says, “Hi, Katniss.”

We’ve all agreed that none of us ever hear her walk up. She just appears. We sort of scoot around to make room for her, and she kneels to lay down her bag off her back. “I have squirrels and rabbits and a grouse,” she says by way of greeting. She looks around and her eyes linger on Peeta for a minute, but not in the way you think, it’s an evaluating look.

“Hey, how much for a rabbit?” Rodja says, his interest caught.

“Well, some are big and some are small,” she says, and she’s pulling them out when Peeta says, “Katniss, there’s a question as to whether I’m crazy.”

It doesn’t feel like he’s interrupting because we were all wondering whether that issue was just going to hang out there forever. Katniss looks up at him, her face serious. She doesn’t hesitate. “You’re not crazy. You’re kind of weird but that isn’t the same.”

His eyebrows go up. He snorts. We all look at Seff and Donal and figure the matter is closed. Then we look at Katniss, tiredly unwrapping a whole string of rabbits, and consider what we’ve just learned about her and the boy sitting across from her and the fact that she just defended him without asking why, without surprise.

We’re of very differing opinions about whether there ever was a toasting or a pregnancy, about what exactly has happened between them, and why they fought for so long after coming back here. But on the other hand there’s this kind of thing in front of our eyes.

“You have like ten thousand rabbits in there,” Trish says, sounding mystified.

“I started with seven. Maybe they’ve been breeding,” she says wryly.

“Honey, did you go by the factory already? Because I’ll get something if Davis hasn’t already,” Fran says.

“I did. He got some turkey legs.”

Her bag appeared to be full when she arrived. We stare at her. She pulls a folded-up bag from under the rabbits. “I had all this full and two turkeys that they bought at the factory. I don’t have any more turkeys, sorry.”

No wonder she looks tired. “You’re going to clean out those woods,” Arn comments.

“Not this season,” she says, satisfied, and continues, “Peeta, do you want a squirrel?”

“Sure, thank you,” he says. We noticed by the end of the summer that they share so much food they may as well combine kitchens.

“Okay. I’ll make you supper.” She says it like a piece of information.

He blinks. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Nope,” she agrees. To Rodja, who has happily selected a rabbit, she says, “Do you want me to clean it?”

“If nobody minds,” he says, handing over a couple of coins. She glances around and proceeds to gut and skin the rabbit in such familiar moves that it’s hard to believe we’ve all seen her in fancy dresses and sparkly nail polish. A couple others of us go through the rabbits and the squirrels and line those up for her.

In between rabbits she pulls a squirrel aside, presumably for Peeta. Then she says to him, “Wait, do you even like what I cook?”

“Sure,” he says, surprised. A couple of us are listening.

“Are you sure? I don’t mean to be like, here, you’re gonna eat this.”

He considers. “No, you’re at least as good as I am at cooking.” She twists her mouth. “Cooking, not baking.”

“Ah.” There is, possibly, a tiny smile on her face.

“What is a grouse?” he says, out of nowhere. She looks up. “I was sort of hoping I’d remember, but no luck.”

We were trying to pretend we weren’t listening, but that gets our attention.

Again, no surprise at all. She puts the rabbit pelt aside and wipes off her fingers and goes back into her bag, pulling out a mottled bird with less heft than a chicken. “Oh, it’s a bird,” Peeta says.

She holds it out, splaying the wings and then the tail. “You would expect it’s a girl bird because it doesn’t have much color besides brown, but with grouse they’re all pretty much the same. They hide really well and when you flush them they go—” She makes a toneless fluttering sound with her mouth, louder than a cat purring. “So they’re kind of startling, which to be honest is why I don’t get that many.” He nods, like having lessons about birds is a normal thing for them, and we all ponder this. She glances up at him. “I’ll keep this one plus the squirrel.”

Josy is stroking the striped tailfeathers. “I like those.”

Katniss deftly pulls out a few and gestures Josy closer. She takes the end of the girl’s braid and carefully sticks the feathers under the tie. Josy looks at the decoration with pleasure, then takes one feather back out and puts it in her brother’s shirt pocket. Without a word, Katniss goes back to skinning squirrels.

A few of us remember seeing the Everdeen girls around, when they were very tiny, with feathers at the ends of their pigtails. We all sort of stare at the kids in front of us. There are so few of them left, it’s hard not to be overprotective of them. But we can’t deny that they seem to have worked out a way to take care of themselves.


End file.
